The Church and the Collective Memory of Poles: The Millennium of Poland’s Baptism – A Case Study

Abstract

The Catholic Church is today one of the key actors in Poland’s politics of memory, understood as efforts aimed at shaping the collective memory of society by establishing a dominant tone in the public discourse on the past. Securing a privileged position in the struggle over the interpretation of history has become not only an expression of the ambitions of various institutions and groups, but also a manifestation of a realistic conviction that the past – and, more precisely, its assessment and interpretation – offers a path toward legitimising their current public role. Shaping a desired image of the past is closely linked to the pursuit of several objectives by the institutional Church, among which are the preservation of its significant presence in public life and its continued participation as an influential actor in public debate. For this reason, alongside other participants in the public sphere, the Church developed its own version of a “politics of memory” and sought, through it, to influence the collective memory of Poles. This activity was already evident during the communist period, and the 1966 Millennium of the Baptism of Poland represents a particularly important moment in which various strands of this policy converged.
The article attempts to reconstruct the Church’s vision of the millennium, outline the main themes present in millennial documents and episcopal speeches, and analyse the contemporary ecclesiastical programme for presenting the past and the objectives it sought to achieve. The author argues that the primary goal of the Church’s “politics of memory” during the millennium celebrations was defensive in nature, serving as a response to the deliberate and systematic state policy of marginalising the Church in the public sphere. Through this strategy, the Church defended its role as an institution shaping national identity and the value system of Polish society. The millennial strategy also aimed to maintain the Church’s real social and political standing by reinforcing traditional forms of Polish religiosity – popular, mass-based, and grounded in the identification of Polishness with Catholicism. In pursuit of these goals, the past became subject to instrumentalisation by both sides of the ideological and political conflict: the Church and the communist authorities. This occurred through the selective emphasis of historical events and, at times, through assigning them conflicting interpretations. In this dispute, the Church enjoyed significantly greater credibility than the communist regime, which only in the 1960s began to incorporate positive references to the thousand-year tradition of Polish statehood into its own strategy of legitimation.